On Wednesday, Amazon demonstrated that it understands the value of openness, even if it's not yet prepared to embrace open standards for the Kindle, by providing an iPhone application that enables users to read their Kindle content on Apple's iPhone, as CNET reports.

As Mozilla's John Lilly opines, the iPhone Kindle application is "useful, if I'm somewhere and forgot my Kindle...and I'm sure that I'll buy books with it to read a snippet, then really read on my Kindle."

In sum, by providing a Kindle for iPhone application, Amazon has opened up a compelling complement to its Kindle device, one that will likely feed more revenue to Amazon while simultaneously crippling rivals' efforts to build a critical mass of iPhone e-book readers.

About the author

Matt Asay is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. Matt brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.
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